Internet Shakespeare Editions

Reading Room

Toolbox

Scene

Scene

Reviewer: Sarah Star

Sarah Star is currently teaching Shakespeare at the University of Toronto, Mississauga
and has previously taught Medieval and Early Modern Drama. She recently defended her
dissertation, "The Seat of the Soul: Blood and Spirituality in Late Medieval English
Literary Culture", at the University of Toronto. Her research argues for a previously
unacknowledged intersection among the histories of fourteenth-century literary, medical,
and vernacular intellectual culture, showing how medieval texts use a specifically
physiological language to represent transformative miracles. These texts also, she
argues, do what medicine cannot: they complicate and extend their physiological background
in order to represent religious identities, mark religious difference, and explain
the inextricability of physical and spiritual life. She has published articles on
Chaucer and Middle English romance, and has articles forthcoming on the relationship
between early English literature and medicine.